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    The Grief of Others
    The Grief of Others
    The Grief of Others
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Grief of Others

    Written by Leah Hager Cohen

    Narrated by Pam Ward

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Is keeping a secret from a spouse always an act of infidelity? And what cost does such a secret exact on a family?

    The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their previous lives. Struggling to regain a semblance of normalcy for themselves and for their two older children, they find themselves pretending not only that little has changed, but that their marriage, their family, have always been intact. Yet in the aftermath of the baby's death, long-suppressed uncertainties about their relationship come roiling to the surface. A dreadful secret emerges with reverberations that reach far into their past and threaten their future.

    The couple's children, ten-year-old Biscuit and thirteen-year-old Paul, responding to the unnamed tensions around them, begin to act out in exquisitely-perhaps courageously-idiosyncratic ways. But as the four family members scatter into private, isolating grief, an unexpected visitor arrives, and they all find themselves growing more alert to the sadness and burdens of others-to the grief that is part of every human life but that also carries within it the power to draw us together.

    Moving, psychologically acute, and gorgeously written, The Grief of Others asks how we balance personal autonomy with the intimacy of relationships, how we balance private decisions with the obligations of belonging to a family, and how we take measure of our own sorrows in a world rife with suffering. This novel shows how one family, by finally allowing itself to experience the shared quality of grief, is able to rekindle tenderness and hope.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 30, 2011
    ISBN9781452674629
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    Reviews for The Grief of Others

    3.5/5

    32 ratings30 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is a story about the Ryrie family, which is composed of mother and father Ricky and John and kids Paul, Biscuit and Jessica, along with sort of about a young man named Gordie who becomes entangled with this family.

      There were certain parts that I liked a great deal and that had a great deal of emotional truth in them, such as Jessica's feeling of floating along, with no tether, after graduating from college and Ricky and John's delicate balancing act throughout their marriage to account for various indiscretions. I also really liked the character of Biscuit, who is a young girl who thinks too much and gets a bit lost in the shuffle of her busy family.

      I feel like the end of the book, where the author attempts to paste on a message of universalness in a very literal fashion, was unnecessary and took away from the more touching aspects of the story.

      I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about family dramas and anyone who is interested in how different people deal with grief.
    • 2/5
      I am still not sure how I feel about this book. On the one hand, I liked the premise but I feel like the execution got lost somewhere. In fact, I think there may be the start of a couple of novels in this book but this book never seemed to finish. I didn't feel like I got to really know any of the characters.
    • 3/5
      Based on what I had read about this I expected to like it a great deal more than I did. In truth this properly lies between a 2 and 3 star for me. Cohen writes beautifully, but she writes about nothing very interesting. What seems to be advanced as profound observation is simply not. It is like a really long story from a participant in a bereavement support group. None of it is very enlightening, but it is probably comforting to the other people sitting around the circle to realize they are not alone.
    • 3/5
      The Grief of Others is a well written story about the loss of an infant. The author does a wonderful job of developing each character. This allows the reader to get a feel for how each member of this family dealt with the loss. I found the story to be rather slow moving at times and I wasn’t always a fan of the parents, John and Ricky.
    • 3/5
      Sometimes it takes me a while to determine how I feel about a novel. In the first 6 pages of The Grief of Others by Leah Cohen, I recognized this book was special. I found myself clutching my chest as I empathized and closing my eyes because sometimes you can find magic in a novel. In the introduction, the author describes how Ricky, the mother in the novel, longs to bottle her infant’s breaths so she can keep them forever. I related to this so much. Even though my son is now 10, I find myself having those thoughts at times.Throughout the novel, we find the family of four, John, Ricky, Paul and their daughter Biscuit, struggle to come to grips with the death of their infant, Simon. Simon was born with a defect that led to his head not fully forming and he died within 3 days of birth. Ricky, who knew he was going to have this defect, chose not to disclose this to anyone, including John, and the repercussions of this come to affect everyone in the family, even John’s daughter from a former relationship, who shows up on their doorstep.There is no protagonist in this novel. There are equal amounts of grief and distress for all of the characters in this book and I felt my heart reach out to them equally. Frequently I wondered why the adults in this novel had such difficulty connecting to their children. Even prior to the death of Simon, John and Ricky still did not seem to have a great ability to reach out to Paul and Biscuit. This manifests in Biscuit cutting school and enacting death rituals to celebrate the life of Simon and Paul’s inability to sleep at night and allowing himself to be bullied at school. Jessica, John’s first child, shows up on their doorstep after no contact for eight years, pregnant and mysterious.The difficulty with this novel is the disjointed nature of the situations. No one in the novel seems capable of connecting with anyone else on any level. The self-absorbed nature of people is on display and it made it hard to want good things for them. However, the very realistic situations that were portrayed and Ricky’s expression of feelings for the child she lost could absolutely take my breath away, at times. This hints to me that there could have been a great deal more to this story, but with so much going on, it just felt lost to me. Overall, I’d recommend it as a read for those that may need someone to relate to who is going through grief and for those that feel to raw to express this to other people. I never really understood the grief of anyone but Biscuit and Ricky, but maybe that can be enough. I have lukewarm feelings but some of the writing was so beautifully done that I am reluctant to give this a bad review. It’s worth it for those brief moments of inspiration alone.Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in order to review it.
    • 4/5
      A family tries to overcome their grief when they lose their third child only hours after his birth. Through their struggle, they overcome other problems in their relationships and begin to connect once again as a loving family.The strength of this story was in the development of the characters, who really came to life for me. I empathized with each of them and their way of coping or not coping with the loss of Baby Simon. This uncorrected proof was beautifully written with the exception of just a few awkward phrases and sentences, which should be corrected with the final editing. Although I have not read any other books by this author, I will be searching them out.
    • 3/5
      This story applies to many families today I believe. It is about love and loss but also the cruelness of secrets kept. Ricky (wife) and John had a decent marriage in the beginning but somehow, it began to unravel. When Ricky became pregnant with an unplanned pregnancy, life continued but with Ricky keeping a horrible secret from John. In addition to this, a year after the baby's death, John's daughter from a previous marriage shows up at their door pregnant. Now Ricky must come to terms with this and with the secret she has kept all along. I enjoyed the intentional separations in the story (last year, this year) as it made it easy to follow, especially with so many characters. However, I was really hoping for more information at the end. Maybe we will never know what happened and how everyone's lives turned out but I am hoping we will.
    • 4/5
      The Grief of Others tells the story of the John and Ricky Rylie, struggling to save their marriage after the loss of their infant son who lived only for 56 hours. They had to deal not only with their loss, but previous losses and a secret Ricky kept from John. The children, Paul and Biscuit, also were dealing with their own grief while not having their parents fully there for them. An adult daughter of John's, Jessie, joins the family, and this helps the family to work through their problems.I loved this book even though it was dark. I lost my three-year old brother when I was a teenager, and I know how isolating and lonely grief can be. I have a happy and loving family, but during that time I lost a part of my parents while they worked through their grief of losing my brother. The author captured those feelings
    • 4/5
      The prologue to THE GUILT OF OTHERS is exquisitely poignant: a mother refusing to let go her new born baby whose congenital birth defects were discovered in the womb when the foetus was five months. The baby’s birth and death brings to the surface molten cracks in the Ryrie family that have simmered unacknowledged for years.The story moves back and forth between John and Ricky Ryrie, their children Paul and Biscuit, John’s pregnant eldest daughter from a previous relationship, Jess, and a stranger, Gordie. Binding them all together, as most of humanity is bound together, are the threads of birth and death.Cohen’s compassionate prose slides easily between the year since the baby was born and died, and the first time Jess met her biological father. In all the Ryrie’s memories, that long ago holiday was a golden time, a time of perfect happiness in which the possibility of death, while a real threat (a single mother drowns in the lake, leaving behind two orphaned children) cannot touch them.But death – in the form of baby Simon – does touch the family and, in doing so, cracks their fears and flaws, their wounds and worries, wide open. The underlying question in the story is whether that perfect holiday was an illusion. Or was the love underpinning it real enough to salvage the family from their current crisis of grief and pain?The last chapter, however, was a bit strange: there were a few questions raised (did John sleep with Madeleine? Were Gordie’s father’s dioramas put on show?) that were dealt with tangentially, as the story shifted from the personal details of a family we, as readers, have come to know intimately, to a more universal viewpoint. I suggest that this was an attempt to link the personal with the collective; to show that all the joys and sorrows of life are shared not only by individual families, but by all people, loved ones and strangers alike. For me, though, while the philosophy behind the chapter was interesting and well-written, the abrupt change of style was confusing, pulling me out of my involvement with the Ryries, rather than leaving me with a sense of restoration and completion.Overall, though, THE GUILT OF OTHERS is a tender and moving story, beautifully written and held together with the lightest of touches
    • 4/5
      This Early Reviewer novel is one of the most compellingly readable books I've experienced in a long while. Despite a few vocab words I needed to look up, the story of the Ryrie family simply flows. I wanted to keep reading. This solid family is now suffering a loss - but when did the REAL loss actually begin, prior to Ricky's and John's marriage, after the summer vacation with Jess, or perhaps even in their childhoods? The novel raises many questions, i.e. why do parents think their children don't feel their pain? What is it about John that causes both Deena and Ricky not to trust him with major decisions about their children? How does Biscuit instinctively know what to do? And because of the questions The Grief of Others raises it would make an excellent Book Club selection.
    • 3/5
      I am not quite done yet and decided to read the reviews to try and find out what i am missing. In the beginning I liked the book, but from the middle towards the end I found everything jumped around and it was hard to get a feel for the continuity of the book. I love Biscuit and was finding her the most interesting charactor, with the most realistic reaction to the pain in this jumbled story. I think I may be reading another book from the reviewers. I will continue to read til the end and hopefully it will all make sense. I guess now that I think of it, families rarely ( if put on paper) would make sense. I am putting my review on both book sites. On GoodReads the reviews are like mine, not as glowing and much more realistic.
    • 4/5
      Cohen is a masterful writer. The crafting of this novel is almost poetic at times. I greatly enjoyed her gift of description. An author with such a talent can pull the reader in, making one feel like they are experiencing the novel first hand.However, with this novel I found the character development to be lacking and was unable to experience the depth of emotions for this family and their plight that I know Cohen was hoping to achieve. When the mother in the novel finds herself pregnant with a child that has life-prohibitive deformities but chooses to keep that knowledge to herself for the second half of the pregnancy, we are not given enough information to understand and sympathize with her choice. Other family dynamics are likewise not as developed as I would have hoped.Cohen masterful utilization of language does compel me to read other of her novels.
    • 2/5
      I received this book as part of the early reviewers program and was excited to jump into it. However, I found the story to be disjointed, hard to get into, and even harder to stick with. I have read numerous other reviews praising this novel, so maybe it's just me. I feel like this is probably a story that either you love or can't get into.
    • 4/5
      A wonderful story of the impact tragedy has on different members of a family. The parents and older children each coped individually and not so well. Once they looked at the other's grief and effects of losing this child, they began to heal together as a family. This was a fast read and I can't think of too much that could have been left out. Wished the story could have gone on and on.
    • 3/5
      This is a story about a family and their grief that also encompasses the grief of others within their radius of life. The Ryrie family has suffered the loss of their newborn son/brother and we watch them deal (or not) in their individual ways. Biscuit, the 10-year-old daughter was a favorite character for me, who in the end was probably the healthiest in her solitary way of acknowledging the loss of her baby brother. I found the story quite believable. The prologue was beautifully written and set the stage well for the unveiling of each character's inner struggle.
    • 3/5
      This was a good book, but the thing that comes immediately to mind when I think about it is that it is extremely OVER descriptive. You can skip pages almost and missing nothing. I did like the story and thought that the characters were very real and likable. Decent read, but I dont know that I would recommend this book.
    • 4/5
      The problem with having a near-brilliant first five pages is that the rest of the book might not live up to it. The first five pages of this book are devastating--it really is the fastest a book has ever made me cry--and beautiful and real. But much of the rest of the book doesn't live up to it. I loved Ricky, but we don't spend much time with her; the author chooses instead to give us pages and pages with her husband John, her children Paul and Biscuit (the cutesy nickname makes me wince, but then one of my children goes by Jibbitz at home, so who am I to judge?), John's grown daughter Jess, a random passerby named Gordie. The diffuse focus weakens the book.

      I really just did not give a rat's ass about Gordie. Sorry. Ultimately what I did care about was Ricky and John and their marriage. The writing of the marriage, of the various ways they fail each other, was very well-done and the best part of the book. I wish there had been more of it! The ending of the book works, despite the self-consciously literary way in which it's written.
    • 4/5
      Grief is quiet and consuming and solitary but it eats away at happiness and connection like an acid. In Leah Hager Cohen's exqusite new novel, grief is smothering the tiny flicker of life left in the Ryrie family. John and Ricky's marriage is failing as they mourn the loss of their infant son a year previously. Not only can they not find their way back to each other, but they cannot find their way to helping their older children, 13 year old Paul, a target of bullying, and 9 year old Elizabeth, called Biscuit, who is skipping school regularly and obsessed with cultural death rituals. The loss of Simon, born with anancephaly and only living 57 hours past his birth, magnifies the existing cracks in the Ryrie family. And the collective silence about his existence and death serves to split the cracks wide open. Into this struggling house comes Jess, John's oldest daughter and the product of a prior relationship. She is in her early twenties, single, and pregnant. Her presence complicates evyerthing and highlights the happier time years before when, as a young teenager, she vacationed with the Ryries. The narrative follows each of the six main characters, getting into their heads and showing the different ways in which their grief and longing cripples them. Each of the characters, the four Ryries, Jess, and Gordie, a young man reeling from his own father's death and introduced to the Ryries through Biscuit, is complete and realistic. While some of the decisions made by the characters, John and Ricky in particular, are hard to understand, the truth and burden of their individual mourning make the decisions real and wrenching, especially when seen in the context of the family and in the impact on each of the other, equally needy, characters. The narrative timeline moves back and forth from the present, capturing the months before Simon's birth and immediately following as well as eight years prior when Jess last spent time with the Ryries. This allows the reader to see into the heart of the familial relationships to their very core, even before grief so overwhelmed them. Cohen's writing is simply gorgeous, filled with amazing descriptions that take your breath away. She has effectively isolated her characters from each other even when they need each other the most and it is impossible to feel anything but deepest sorrow at their very alone-ness. That each of them is profoundly lonely and incapable of re-establishing long frayed bonds is overwhelming and adds to the pervasive sadness of the story above and beyond the loss of a baby. The characters' very secrets hold them at arms length from each other, husband from wife, parents from children, Ryries from family outsiders, and the revelation of their deepest beliefs will change their lives forever. While it is hard to comprehend the remoteness of the characters, Cohen has done a marvelous job drawing these broken people who have lost the ability to trust and to nurture and to make a family. Absorbing and effecting, this was a moving novel about loss and secrets and family and trust and the struggle to emerge from grief not unchanged but whole.
    • 3/5
      The two children were the most interesting and empathetic characters in this, I thought. The book seemed influenced by James salter, but not as good.
    • 4/5
      A particularly fine offering from LibraryThing's Early Reader program, this is about a family wounded by the loss of a baby days after his birth, and how the tragedy stresses fault lines that had developed years ago. John and Rickie Ryrie struggle to find a balance in their marriage after their baby's death, but secrets concealed by Rickie from her husband about the pregnancy tilts their marriage almost irretrievably, until the unexpected arrival of John's adult daughter from before he married offers a chance for them and their children to find a way to deal with their grief. Finely written, with memorable and compelling characters, but occasionally veers off into distracting paths.
    • 4/5
      An exploration of the ramifications of a tragedy upon a whole family told from each member's point of view.
    • 4/5
      despite the uniqueness of the circumstances of the cast of characters, this story goes to the universality of human emotions and interactions - heart wrenching sad at times but so well written I had to finish the book
    • 3/5
      This novel started very beautifully and weaved artfully the stories of six characters and their various responses to grief, from death and also, from abandonment and loss (as done to each other). The writing is excellent and the observations about human beings quite astute, from the youngest character, Biscuit, who is ten, to the quietly brooding and perpetually dissatisfied parents, Ricky and John. In fact, it got a bit tedious in spots and the parents continually choose to be miserable and never seem to appreciate what they do have. They obsess about each other and their fractured marriage ad nauseum. I wanted to shake them and/or sit them down for a serious round of therapy to get over themselves. However, this is realistic, just a bit of a chore in spots to read. Cohen renders children and teenagers especially well, with grace and that confused thing that is adolescence. Those characters (Biscuit, Paul, Gordie and Jessica) were entirely more pleasant to read about, and care about. The parents were very, very hard to like. Anyway, the only real issue I have with novel was the ending, egads, it was tacked on, obtuse and full of those weird unanswerable questions to, I presume, me, the reader. It was out of place and refused to let the story end naturally as it tried to make a global point about everyone and everything. Totally unnecessary. I would have rated this book way higher without the bizarre ending. Still, recommended, but tepidly. I do see why it was long listed for the 2012 Orange Prize though, it is beautiful and very perceptive in many spots.
    • 3/5
      The writing in this book could be absolutely delightful, worthy of the Women's Prize longlist recognition, but some of the choices the author made about the direction of the plot or development of the characters seemed too out of place for me to thoroughly enjoy the writing itself. I really wanted to like this book, but I really needed it to touch me more than it did. I spent so much time being frustrated about the story that I couldn't settle into the flow of writing. A pity, since it really could have pulled me in. I wanted so much to feel more of this book than I could. That is either my preferences or frustrations talking and doesn't make for a good review, but that is really all I feel I can put here.
    • 2/5
      I'm not sure what to think of this novel. The story sounded interesting. But, I had a really hard time getting into the story - the characters didn't grab me at all - I never really understood their motivations. The timeline was somewhat disjointed and hard to follow at times. I kept waiting for something to happen, but nothing ever did. As I read, the picture in my mind of the setting was always foggy and in black and white - I think that's reflective of my lack of interest in the story. If I hadn't been reading this for the Early Reviewers program, I probably would not have finished this book. Honestly, I'm relieved it's over.
    • 4/5
      This book is about a family of four who never properly grieved for the loss of their fifth member, baby Simon. Simon was born with a birth defect and as a resule died three days after he was born. His mother Ricky struggled the hardest on the outside, but the effects could be seen throughout the entire family. Biscuit is acting out, Paul is folding in on himself and parents John and Ricky are drawing a wedge in their marriage. The story continues to add new characters, Jess, John's daughter from a previous marriage shows up just when the family needs her most. Together, they find a way to heal and create a whole family when a piece is missing.
    • 3/5
      There is something about this book... something that speaks in a small, still voice, that asks you to listen close. Cohen doesn't hit the reader over the head with emotion, or wrench the reader through a roller coaster ride of a story. Instead, she offers real, heartfelt, poignancy that echoes in your soul long after the last page has been turned.
    • 4/5
      Excellent novel, beautifully written.
    • 5/5
      When I picked up “The Grief of Others”, I had finished another book and just needed another 10 minutes or so of reading to put me to sleep. This was in my “To Be Reviewed” pile and I was sure that I’d read a page or two and then choose something else a bit more mindless for that last bit of reading time.Instead, I was immediately drawn to the fragile, brittle beauty of this story, of author Leah Hager Cohen’s words. The premise of the book immediately inspires sadness…as a mother I cannot even fathom the thought of losing a child, and yet there is something about this book that grabbed onto me and wouldn’t let me go.“He was out of the womb and alive in the world for fifty-seven hours – a tally that put him in rare statistical company and caused in his mother an absurd sense of pride – during which time she kissed his ears and insteps and toes and palms and knuckles and lips repeatedly, a lifetime of kisses.”That paragraph is absolutely heartbreaking – but it feels so real that I was just in awe. As much as I never want to imagine the pain and grief of a mother holding her child that she knows does not have long to live, the way the author creates the images seem absolutely…right.This is the story of a mother, and a father…and brother and sister…a family who must move on after tragedy but is unsure exactly what that “after” looks like. There are many heartrending parts to this book. The scene where Ricky (the baby’s mother) learns of her child’s birth defect…”The radiologist there in the obstetric ultrasound suite explained that the condition was ‘incompatible with life’, a phrase that took Ricky several seconds to understand, but which then struck her not as sneakily euphemistic but as surprisingly elegant and apt, free of judgment.” This is a woman, who with her third child, heads to what should be a routine ultrasound thinking she will be coming home with a picture to hang on the fridge and admire, thinking this will be the first special picture of the newest member of their family (“The moment, that moment, of seeing the little profile!”)…and who is instead dealt a devastating blow.The grief and hurt and repressed feelings pile up in the members of the family…with few outlets as they try to pretend everything is all right after the death of the baby. Only Ricky was able to hold him, in fact, she was unable to let go. “…once he’d left her arms the force of her grief gouged her. She’d had no inkling it would be like this: not simply lonely-making, but corrosive. She was filled with hatred. Some of it for herself.”Something about that word, corrosive, stayed with me. Intense feelings can consume us – eat away at our soul. This woman, this family has a struggle to try and avoid that future, try and repair that which is eating away at them.But along with their grief – there is beauty. There is love, and the memories of the joy and happiness that they once shared – the picture perfect moments that they need to hold on to through the darkest of times.“…Ricky realizes that there have been a few stellar days, or parts of days: moments that seemed instantly to become emblazoned in her mind as postcards she will look back on. Scavenging for late season blueberries, and Biscuit turning out to be the best seeker of them all. Playing cards all day, the day it rained without stopping, and eating popcorn straight from the metal pot. Hiking on the blazed trails and logging roads that suddenly opened up and as suddenly stopped, like ghost boulevards in the old forest; the sun filtering down as if in slow motion through the crown cover, the light somehow altered, distilled, as though it had been sent from a long time ago.”The book was about people so fragile, so carefully patched together after disaster that it seemed as if too strong a breath might scatter the pieces. It is about people trying as best they can to hold on to the life they knew in the face of a tragedy they never expected. It is a lovely, sad, beautiful and emotional story of people. Of the frailty of human beings and the incredible strength of human love.
    • 3/5
      Although the main impetus of this novel is John and Ricky loss of their third child, many other factors impacting their family life rather take over this story. Much of the writing, I felt, was good, but a bit on the "too descriptive" side. The whole point of Jess's visit was more or less lost on me and I felt the story could have gotten along without her. Why she deceived John and Ricky about her reason for leaving her parents was never brought to light. The culmination of her pregnancy was anti-climactic. She seemed to be emotionally more of a 15 year old than 23. Important issues present, such as hate crime and bullying, were not explored well or brought to any culmination. I really didn't feel I "liked" any of the characters much except, of course, for Bisquit and possibly Gordy. In spite of all this, I finished the book and thought over all it was OK. I did like how she handled the ending in explaining why she felt certain little dramas within the book didn't really need closure.